By European Commission, 2011
The aim of the INFU foresight project is to explore and discuss the implications of future innovation patterns for business and policy. The INFU scenarios are designed to address this shortcoming. They depict comprehensive, consistent and plausible images of possible future European innovation landscapes, showing the main actors, their societal environment, specific challenges, and implications for wealth creation, social cohesion and sustainable development. As a time horizon, we selected 2025, a year which is close enough to the present to make the scenarios relevant for today’s decision making yet remains far enough in the future to make major changes in innovation patterns imaginable and even probable.
- Baseline scenario. Nothing changes. The baseline, or reference, scenario shows an almost unaltered future as regards present structures and present innovation patterns. The challenges resulting from an ageing and shrinking population, global competition, environmental issues and resource scarcity are inadequately met. Ultimately, muddling-through politics lead to decline. In the global innovation race, the European Union falls behind.
- Scenario 1: Unleashing the Creative Spirit. Europe’s Innovative Societies. By2025, the European Union has become energised by a new spirit of creativity and has turned into the world’s innovation centre, a global innovation hotspot, offering excellent research conditions and providing the world with sustainable innovations, helping it to cope with the grand challenges of our times. European societies have become a highly valued source for new product and services ideas, but above all for social innovation. In addition, sustainable business and consumption patterns have become the norm – economic growth and social welfare are no longer exclusively defined in monetary values.
- Scenario 2: The Exhausted Giant. European Innovation Fatigue. Demographic ageing, inadequate policy responses, high competitive pressure from other extremely innovative world regions, and a certain “innovation fatigue” of its population cause the European Union to lose most of its innovation capacity by2025. Faced with this situation, policymakers and entrepreneurs stick to obsolete models of growth and welfare, education and innovation. The few remaining innovation activities are exclusively business- driven and not embedded in systemic approaches to sustainable development.
- Scenario 3: Locally-Driven Innovation – Cities Go Ahead. In 2025, Europe’s innovation landscape has changed significantly. Cities, agglomerations, and regional governments have replaced European or national bodies as the most important mediators and facilitators of innovation. They made up for the lack of national and EU guidance and the entrepreneurs’ growing reluctance to innovate. Thanks to local citizen initiatives, Europe’s innovation capacity has returned to a high level while companies play only a moderate role for pushing innovations. In 2025, innovation is realised and organised at the local micro level and provides solutions mainly, but not only, for urban challenges.
- Scenario 4: Prometheus Unbound: Innovations for Innovation’s Sake. Europe has set the course for innovation and competitiveness. All major actors – from commerce, politics, and society as such – collaborate to open and streamline innovation processes, overhaul rigid administrative systems and promote innovation at every level, financially and by providing good framework conditions. Europeans are highly motivated to contribute ideas. Since innovations are guided mostly by an economic rationale, environmental problems are not addressed in a comprehensive and effective way and a part of the population drops out of this fast-paced lifestyle.
